Pentagon spends billions to fight roadside bombs, with little success

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Pentagon spends billions to fight roadside bombs, with little success
Posted on Sunday, March 27, 2011
By Peter Cary and Nancy A. Youssef | Center for Public Integrity and McClatchy Newspapers

WASHINGTON — In February 2006, with roadside bombs killing more and more American soldiers in Iraq, the Pentagon created an agency to defeat the deadly threat and tasked a retired four-star general to run it.

Five years later, the agency has ballooned into a 1,900-employee behemoth and has spent nearly $17 billion on hundreds of initiatives. Yet the technologies it's developed have failed to significantly improve U.S. soldiers' ability to detect unexploded roadside bombs and have never been able to find them at long distances. Indeed, the best detectors remain the low-tech methods: trained dogs, local handlers and soldiers themselves.

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Meanwhile, roadside bombs remain the single worst killer of soldiers as more U.S. forces have been transferred out of Iraq and into Afghanistan. Known in military parlance as improvised explosive devices, the crude, often-homemade bombs killed 368 coalition troops in Afghanistan last year, by far the highest annual total since 2001, when the U.S.-led war there began, according to icasualties.org, which tracks military casualties in the Afghanistan and Iraq wars.

Among the serious questions about how well JIEDDO has spent its billions:

* The agency failed to collect data on its projects, leading a congressional investigative subcommittee to conclude in 2008, "The nation does not yet know if JIEDDO is winning the (counter-IED) fight."